Katie B’s. Art of Persuasion

Pratt Summary

Pratt’s son was in first grade and that’s when she noticed that he was using contact zones without knowing. Her son and his friend were talking about baseball cards and the players they had. They were trying to pronounce the names of players and they would organize their cards by color schemes, value of cards, player’s ages and even their ranks. Pratt’s son learned not only player’s names but how even race played part in the baseball game. Using these things that not only baseball cards taught him, he was able to learn the understanding of cultures but also the merging of cultures.

            Autoenthographics (is part of the contact zones) is describes as “people undertake to describe themselves in way that engage with representation others have made of them” (pg. 35). So what does this mean, it means that when people are to explain what their culture is, they take in the other influences from other cultures and they are not giving the true definition. An example of the is taken from the reading on page 35, “The concept might help explain why some of the earliest published writing  by Chicanas took the form of folkloric manners  and customs sketches written in English and published in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines.”

            Transculturation is describes as “…processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from material transmitted by a subordinate or metropolitan culture” (pg. 36).  An example of this is by a Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940’s wanted to replace concepts of “acculturation and assimilation used by characterized culture under conquest” (pg. 36). To put into terms that we can understand it means that even culture leaders tried to change the different characters that the culture possessed, with adding different culture characters to their own culture, changing the meaning of the original definition.